NASA researchers suggest sea levels may be plunging around Greenland because of ice loss and a resulting decline in gravitational pull.
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Category: physics – Page 305
Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists.
If further data support this observation, it could mark the first confirmed finding of a primordial black hole, guiding theories about the beginnings of the universe.
In February, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced the first successful detection of gravitational waves.
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We spend our lives surrounded by high-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.
Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.
Thanks to Moore’s law and a number of developments in physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics over the past 50 years (leading to Nobel Prizes in chemistry in 1998 and 2013) we can now carry out many experiments entirely on computers using modeling.
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Until now, art historians dismissed some doodles in da Vinci’s notebooks as “irrelevant.”
But a new study from Ian Hutchings, a professor at the University of Cambridge, showed that one page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contained something groundbreaking: The first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.
Although it has been common knowledge that da Vinci conducted the first systematic study of friction (which underpins the modern science of tribology, or the study of friction, lubrication, and wear), we didn’t know how and when he came up with these ideas.
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A new paper asserts that a physical body might be able to pass through a wormhole in spite of the extreme tidal forces that are at play.
A physical object, such as a person or a spacecraft, could theoretically make it through a wormhole in the centre of a black hole, and maybe even access another universe on the other side, physicists have suggested.
In what looks like the logical extension of the plot of Interstellar – where astronauts try to hunt down another universe after the catastrophic effects of climate change destroy Earth – physicists have modelled what would happen to a chair, a scientist, and a spacecraft, if each one ended up inside the spherical wormhole of a black hole.
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According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet if the flow of time is an illusion, how do we account for the distinction between past, present and future? In June, 60 physicists gathered for four days at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to debate this another questions about the mysteries of time.
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Science and the internet have an uneasy relationship: Science tends to move forward through a careful and tedious evaluation of data and theory, and the process can take years to complete. In contrast, the internet community generally has the attention span of Dory, the absent-minded fish of “Finding Nemo”(and now “Finding Dory”) — a meme here, a celebrity picture there — oh, look … a funny cat video.
Thus people who are interested in serious science should be extremely cautious when they read an online story that purports to be a paradigm-shifting scientific discovery. A recent example is one suggesting that a new force of nature might have been discovered. If true, that would mean that we have to rewrite the textbooks.
As a physicist, I’d like to shed a disciplined scientific light on the claim.
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Scientists have captured new images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancers. The three-dimensional structure could help researchers develop novel therapies and diagnostic tools for diseases that are caused by a malfunction in calcium adsorption.
Alexander Sobolevsky’s lab at Columbia University Medical Center is studying a family of proteins called “Transient receptor potential (TRP)” channels. These proteins line surfaces inside the body, such as the intestine, and form pores that help calcium cross a dense barrier of lipid and protein called the membrane to reach the interior of the cell.
“Scientists have found that a TRP channel variant, called TRPV6, is present in excess amounts in the tumor cells of some cancer patients,” says senior author Alexander Sobolevsky, PhD, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center. “And patients who have higher quantities of TRPV6 seem to have a more aggressive form of the disease.”
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